Do you have a picture of the front end of the rig?

for?

theres nothing in front of the grill and nothing in the radiator, you can clearly see light to the other side.  What is normal operating temp on these? max temp?

is there a winch in the front? etc.

my sammie with a cam runs hot also i'm changing out the stock fan clutch today and will see how it does, it runs good when cool out but now summer is just now getting here it starts to heat up, next will be for me to pull the rad and shoot some new black paint on it to see if that helps.

hope this works, kind of an idiot when it comes to uploading stuff...

holy crap! I did it!!! lol.  Any who, it has the lights on, but the radiator is completely clear from side to side.

That looks good, the lights might give you problems over 65 mph but for the most part of normal driving they should be no problem, looks real good I used to drive around all over the place and play in the tank traps. lol

Its a fun little truck, supposed to run nightmare tonight, but I'm not going to if I cant get it to hold temp.

it's 62 deg. here now supposed to get to 80 deg. here today so I will try mine out, if the paint trick does not work I will have to get a three row rad from trail tough, not looking forward to that! I used to go to red rock and cuddle back allot when I lived  in cali.

Cool, you might have ran nightmare before then.  It can be accessed from redrock and garlock.  Well, I'm off to the parts house. yay. hoping something works.

Ya I never really knew the names of some of the trails there but I do remember coming down a hill in my rail about 80 mph with both back tires locked up and hit a large rock at the bottom and opened up the engine case like a can opener and that was the end of that trip!

That sucks.

Well, new tstat, made sure to thouroughly "burp" the system.  Still running hot.  I honestly do not know what to do anymore.

At this point I have to believe the issue is that you simply do not have a large enough radiator.  With the upgraded engine you are running a lot more heat then with a stock configuration.  Both Sammy's in my club that run built up 1.3 motors had to upgrade to thicker radiators, I don't think the eco replacement is going to be enough.  You might want to look at the 2.0 conversion radiator instead.

Make sure your running antifreeze as well, it cools better then straight water.

Well I got my new fan clutch in and took it on a good hard two hour run with three people in it in 75 deg weather and the only problem I had was the hood popped to the safety latch so we must have gone over one too many large rocks a little too fast but I did some first gear low range crawling and never smelled any antifreeze so I think it did the trick, so far.